One of the main goals of science
educators is developing students’ higher order thinking skills. In the past, laboratory
activities were not planned to create new knowledge, but to confirm already
known theories. Mostly, students followed a recipe for data collecting in order
to confirm facts or laws, which they were exposed to in their previous studies.
During the year 2001, a new module “Case-based Computerized Laboratory” (CCL)
was developed at the Technion. The module integrates computerized desktop
experiments with emphasis on scientific inquiry and case studies. The research
objective was to investigate the effect of case-based desktop experiments on
students' higher order thinking skills, including question posing and inquiry.
The research population consisted of 196 honors of 12th grade chemistry
students. Research instruments included case-based pre- and posttests that examined
higher order thinking skills. As part of the tests, each student was asked to
pose three questions, to which he/she could not find the answer in the case
study. Each such question was analyzed by three criteria: The content of the
question, the thinking level required for answering the question, which could
be knowledge/understanding or higher-order thinking, and the level(s) of
chemistry understanding - symbolic, macroscopic, microscopic, and process -
that the answer to the question required. The findings have shown that the
number and complexity of questions that students posed in the post-test were by
far higher than the corresponding numbers in the pretest. In the inquiry
skills, the posttest results were higher than the pretest results in
formulating a research question, defining the dependent and independent
variable and defining the control variables. The results of the CCL project
show that more students were capable of analyzing case-studies and designing a
new scientific inquiry.
